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Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed that those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26.
Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He was well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI’s strongest contributors who was essential to developing some of its products.
“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones at this difficult time,” a statement from OpenAI said.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26 in what police said “appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation. The city’s chief medical examiner’s office confirmed the way of death to be suicide.
His parents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they are still looking for answers, describing their son as a “happy, smart and brave young man” who loved to walk and had recently returned from a trip with friends.
Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first arrived at the new AI research lab for a summer internship in 2018 while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned a few years later to work at OpenAI, where one of his first projects, called WebGPT, helped pave the way for ChatGPT.
“Suchir’s contributions to this project were essential, and it would not have succeeded without him,” OpenAI co-founder John Schulman said in a social media post commemorating Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what made him such an exceptional engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and ability to spot subtle bugs or logical errors.
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“He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He would think through the details of things carefully and strictly.”
Balaji later moved on to organize the huge datasets of online writings and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI’s flagship large language model and a basis for the company’s famous chatbot. It was that work that Balaji eventually asked the technology he helped build, especially to newspapers, novelists and others began suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.
He first raised his concerns with The New York Times, which reported them in October Balaji’s profile.
He later told The Associated Press that he was “trying to testify” in the strongest cases of copyright infringement and considered a lawsuit brought by The New York Times last year the “most serious.” Times lawyers named him in a Nov. 18 court filing as someone who may have “unique and relevant documents” supporting allegations of OpenAI’s willful copyright infringement.
His records were also sought by lawyers in a separate case brought by book authors including the comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing.
“It doesn’t feel right to train on people’s data and then compete with them in the market,” Balaji told the AP in late October. “I don’t think you can do that. I don’t think you can do that legally.”
He told the AP that he gradually grew more disillusioned with OpenAI, especially after the internal turmoil that led to his board of directors being fired and then CEO Sam Altman being reinstated last year. Balaji said he was generally concerned about how their commercial products were rolling out, including their tendency to spout false information known as hallucinations.
But of the “bag of problems” he was concerned about, he said he focused on copyright as the one where it was “actually possible to do something about.”
He acknowledged that it was an unpopular opinion within the AI research community, which is used to pulling data from the Internet, but said “they will have to change and it’s a matter of time.”
He was not impeached and it is unclear to what extent his revelations will be admitted as evidence in any legal cases after his death. He also published a personal blog post with his opinions on the subject.
Schulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he and Balaji coincidentally left on the same day and celebrated with fellow colleagues over dinner and drinks at a bar in San Francisco that night. Another of Balaji’s mentors, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, had left OpenAI several months earlierwhich Balaji saw as another impetus to leave.
Schulman said Balaji had told him earlier this year of his plans to leave OpenAI and that Balaji didn’t think better-than-human AI, known as artificial general intelligence, was “just around the corner, like the rest of the company seemed to believe.” The younger engineer expressed interest in getting a doctorate and exploring “some more off-the-beaten path ideas about how to build intelligence,” Schulman said.
Balaji’s family said a memorial is planned for later this month at the India Community Center in Milpitas, California, not far from his hometown of Cupertino.
& copy 2024 The Canadian Press
